Wednesday, 30 December 2009

Ooh, I love making new year resolutions! They're so much fun to break. Ok. They are not. I made resolutions on the eve of my birthday and need I say, I hardly ever followed them :(

Now is my second chance. To make another set of resolutions. Except, this time I'm going to follow them. Sincerely. They're imperative for what I've planned for my future. Very important. So here are my resolutions for 2010, not in any order.

Write a poem/song: This one figures in my resolutions almost every year. I want to write a song, or at the least, a poem. No. A song. That's easier, right? I'm amazed at how a poet manages to compare silky flowing hair to a broomstick so beautifully. I can just never do it. This year I'm going to work hard at it.

Stop eating 'unreal food' for lunch and dinner: The only reason this is here is because I just got yelled at for not eating 'real food'. Apparently, maggie and marie biscuits come from a parallel universe and are not 'real'.

Learn to find the greater of two given fractions: Ramanujam is avenging me. I know it. I still remember, that evening, as a little girl learning the beauty of halves and one-thirds when I had invented an easy method of 'sorting' fractions in the ascending order. I had ridiculed the famous mathematician for not 'seeing' the simple method of doing it. Of course, the logic made no sense whatsoever (which took me months to realise), but hey, you can't blame a little girl for putting in so much thought into fractions. Well anyway, Ramanujan was offended and he cursed me to never learn working with fractions and till today, fractions bring me to my knees. And I am not going to let Ramanujam win.

Learn a new language: And it's called Gibberish. I've come to realise it's very useful for a person planning to pursue MBA. Wish me luck.

Learn to lie: I can't lie. Blame it on my birth date. But I need to know how to lie. I've seen the benefits of it. Besides, lying is a creative activity. It needs wit, presence of mind, prudence and creativity. People who can lie make convincing story-tellers. And that is why I need to learn this art form. For animation's sake.

About the year that passed, I don't even remember the resolutions I'd made. I was 21 for a major part of the year and true to the astrology book I'd read somewhere, it definitely was a 'happening' year. Lots of ups, lots of happiness and lots of downs, lots of sadness both at their extremes. New experiences, new insights, it was as if I was given a crash course on life. I hated it, but I managed to weather through it and emerge wiser and confident than ever before. I didn't realise it then, but I needed it for otherwise, I'd have been a lost soul. Now, I know what I want. I know exactly what to do. With the road forward visible with such clarity, I couldn't be more ready to embrace the year ahead.

Saturday, 12 December 2009

Does car parking send chills down your spine? Fret no more, because here's a solution. I found this article here. It says,

Dumbfounded at the thought of parking your car in a small space? Don't worry, now scientists have developed a mathematical formula that will help motorists park perfectly.

The formula, developed by Prof Blackburn from the University of London's Royal Holloway College, begins by using the radius of a car's turning circle and the distance between the vehicle's front and back wheels. Then, using the length of the car's nose and the width of an adjacent car the formula can tell exactly how big a space needs to be for your car to fit.

By applying this to basic parking guidelines, one can work out exactly when to turn the steering wheel to slide in perfectly, The Telegraph reported.

So next time you find a small parking place, stop the car, get your pens, pencils, erasers, scratchpads, calculators out, use the formula and calculate exactly when and at what angle you need to turn your car, then find a giant protractor to turn the car by exactly that angle and if you've made no mistakes in your calculation, congratulations. You've successfully parked your car! Parking a car could never be easier and so much fun!